Volume Iii Part 13 (1/2)

'Yes, dear grandfather, it is true,' replied the young girl, as she threw herself at his feet, and clasped her arms around his knees. 'It was the word of Christ that I read to you when, in the darkness of your soul, you cursed the day of your birth; it was the word of Christ that gave you peace when you would have denounced eternal perdition to your people!'

'You are a Christian at heart, Benjamina, and you love this Christian?'

asked the old man, slowly, and apparently with a painful effort.

'Yes, grandfather--yes. I cannot deny the truth,' sobbed the weeping girl, as she bathed his hands with her tears.

'You, also, Benjamina!--you also, daughter of my Rachel!--the last hope of my old days, you also!'

Tears choked his further utterance, and the old man covered his head with his garment, turned away, and tottered towards the door.

'Farewell, then, for _this_ world!' said Benjamina to her sorrow-stricken lover, as with a strong effort she withdrew herself from his encircling arms. 'Yonder--above! where love, and justice, and mercy rule--where Jehovah and Christ are one--we shall be united for evermore!--Father, I will go with you!' she said, as she hastened after the old man. 'Take me with you, and let me die in your arms, but curse me not in the hour of death, for my soul has only bent to the will of the Most High.'

'Lost, for this world!' sighed the young man, as the door closed upon her he loved so much; and all hope seemed extinguished for them on earth.

V.

'What is the matter with you, my son? You go about like one in a dream, and as if the world in which you live were nothing to you,' said the old doctor one day to his son, the young painter, shortly after their guests had left them. 'If you cannot conquer your love, and if the girl return your affection in an equal degree, I am willing to withdraw my objection to your marriage, and old Philip Moses is too worthy a man to wish to make you both miserable.'

'I honour him for the unshaken sincerity of his religious feelings,'

replied his son, 'although these will bring me to the grave. I have had a long conversation with him, father: I might have rebelled against his severity, but his mildness has overcome me, and taken from me my last hope. I know that from a sense of grat.i.tude he might bring himself even to join our hands; but the heart of the old man would break in doing so, and I should have to look upon myself as the murderer both of him and Benjamina. He is immovable in his adherence to his creed; and even though he might give Benjamina to me himself, he would curse her in his heart for having deserted the faith of her forefathers.'

'But she has already deserted that faith in her own mind; she loves you; and the old man knows all this, yet he has not condemned her.'

'Still he might do so, if she were openly to throw off Judaism. He loves her as he does his own soul, but he would deem his soul doomed to perdition if it could stray from _Jehovah_, as he calls his peculiar wors.h.i.+p.'

'Well, have patience, my son. The old man's days are numbered. My medical knowledge enables me to tell you that death is already creeping over him.

'Ah, father! you do not know Benjamina; though her heart should break, she would be as true to the dead as she is to the living. But I would not that a knowledge of my grief should add to her sufferings, or deprive her of the peace she may perhaps acquire in the performance of what she considers her duty. Allow me to travel, father! There is no hope of happiness before me _now_ in this world; but I will seek tranquillity in the charming land which is sacred to the arts, and in absence from all that may recall the past.'

Thus the father and son conversed, while the rabbi, Philip Moses, was engaged in consecrating the great sin-offering for his unhappy people.

Three days after this event the old man breathed his last in the arms of the faithful Benjamina.

VI.

'The Jews are going to bury their last prophet to-day,' said a lounger on the 'Jungfernstieg' to one of his a.s.sociates. 'See how they are gathering from all corners! And any one of them who meets the hea.r.s.e must follow it.'

'It is old Philip Moses,' replied the other: 'he was the only honest Jew in Hamburg, and some say he is the last of the old Mosaic type in the world. He died in the belief, notwithstanding all their wanderings and miseries, that _his_ nation were the holiest on earth, and G.o.d's favourite people. When he was dying, they say, he had his windows opened, expecting that their Messiah would come flying in to carry him and his people away back to the promised land.'

'What absurd folly!' exclaimed the first speaker laughing; 'however, we must admit that he was consistent to the last.'

And ridiculing the Jews, they entered one of the pavilions near the Alster.

Towards evening, a young man in a travelling dress stood at the gate of the churchyard belonging to the Jewish community, and gazed sadly and earnestly at a female figure, which, in a deep mourning dress, was kneeling by a newly-made grave. The traveller was the young painter Veit, who had engaged post-horses for that very evening to take him from his native town on his way towards Italy, where he intended to bury himself and his hopeless pa.s.sion amidst the cla.s.sic ruins of Rome.

Benjamina's self-sacrificing devotion to her grandfather, and his patriarchal adherence to the faith of his ancestors, which held up to execration every departure from that faith, and the intermingling with those whose religion was different, had entirely destroyed his long-cherished hopes; but he determined once again to see his beloved Benjamina, once more to be a.s.sured of her sentiments towards him, and then to take a last and sad farewell.

With this resolution he had approached her dwelling, just as the hea.r.s.e, containing the mortal remains of old Philip Moses, was leaving it. Seeing this, he mingled among the mourners and followed the funeral _cortege_, although the pa.s.sers-by wondered to see a fair-haired Christian, in a travelling garb, among the mumbling Jews who accompanied the dead to his last resting-place.